The 10-year process of writing “Ogallala” began when Bair, part of the third generation of a western Kansas farm family, was teaching writing at the University of Wyoming and went to a conference on the topic of Western watersheds.

“I wrote an essay about the aquifer after that trip,” she recalls in a phone interview. “I was not happy with it. I felt kind of icky about it, and complicit in the fate of the aquifer.”

By 2001, “I knew I was writing a book, but I knew it needed a personal story to go with it.”

Along came a cowboy.

Ward — Bair has fictionalized his name and home town to shelter his identity — materializes, complete with pickup truck and cattle dog, in the book’s opening as the writer, then in her 50s, hunts for aquifer-fed springs along a dying creek. And their long-distance, alike-but-opposite attraction propels much of the book’s journey.

“I knew what worked would be to get the one-on-one out there very early in the book,” she said. “But I just couldn’t make myself do it for the longest time. I didn’t want people to think it was just a love story.”

And “Ogallala” isn’t. It’s about her plunges into high-altitude, ice-cold California mountain lakes in her 20s; the tiny Mojave-desert community where her son was conceived; and single parenthood in her 30s as a University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop student who summered on her parents’ Kansas land.

At the farm, she drives a tractor planting arrow-straight rows of corn, but refuses to touch the insecticide-dusted seed she spreads. She longs to douse the harsh, mercury-vapor light that banishes the stars from the prairie nights, but relents because a neighbor fears the dark.

Always central is the land and its water: what they make possible — food, community, family — and what is done unto them to reap that harvest.

“As I lived the story, I realized that my attraction to Ward had more to do with my unconscious conflicts over our land ownership,” she says. “It was my deep desire to get back into the right relationship with that land.”

At one point in the book, she realizes it was Kansas she’d been making love to all along.

“What is making love, after all?” she asks. “It’s trying to be one with something. And I’d been separated by living elsewhere and the changes that had happened on the land while I was away.”

Now in her 60s with a 3-year-old grandson, Bair lives in Longmont. She is active in slow investing groups that foster sustainable farming.

“I wanted to take part in a kind of agriculture I could get behind ethically,” she says.

Bair thinks that in Westerners’ minds, there’s a false dichotomy between being an environmentalist and being a business person. In fact, her memoir testifies to their intimate entwinement.

In the book, she runs spreadsheets to show her father that without the government subsidies, the farm barely breaks even on its hypergreen, hypertreated cornfields. “They’re paying us to throw away water,” she protests to him. She recalls the gray dirt visible between the far-spaced, rainfall-watered cornstalks of her early childhood.

“My environmental ethic didn’t come from when I was in California, with all those hippies out there,” she jokes. “It came from the tallgrass prairie.”

Mexican restaurant Casa Bonita has been a memory-making institution for decades, filling children with countless sopapillas and dreams of plummeting from the top of a man-made, three-story indoor waterfall while people eat tacos, listen to Mariachi music and watch puppet shows around them.